Actor Dan Stevens is Not the (Proper British) Man You Think He Is

In America, Dan Stevens is famous for making moral rectitude sexy on Downton Abbey, but across the pond he's known as the ultimate multihyphenate: an actor-writer-thinker-producer-critic who pulls it all off with panache.

Years ago, before television came to compete with and arguably surpass film as a narrative art form, it was fashionable to ascribe the tag of "rubbish" to nearly everything on the air save what was brought to us by PBS. The era of great cable dramas eventually shifted our view. We became a nation in thrall to Tony Soprano and Don Draper — psychologically strained, morally unbridled capitalists in the business of making lots of money. PBS's fustiness became less tolerable. And then, suddenly, two years ago, with the arrival of Downton Abbey, a sharp, lively, and lushly shot examination of the compromises made in the name of preserving wealth and position, the network powerfully recolonized our attention.

It does not overstate things to distinguish Dan Stevens as a primary force in the series's enormous success. Returning for an avidly anticipated third season in January, Downton Abbey is, of course, a period piece revolving around the shifting fortunes of the extended Crawley family and the vast country estate from which the series borrows its name. It begins just after the sinking of the Titanic, a tragedy that reconfigures the lines of succession, leaving Stevens's character, Matthew Crawley, a third cousin who has lived beyond the parameters of the aristocracy, Downton's presumptive heir. Stevens's skill as an actor, in this particular instance, is to bring heat to decency. Matthew is a man of few snobberies, few subversions, but Stevens never allows him to descend into blandness. He finesses that great English tradition of making humility a potent agent of romantic attraction.

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"We were looking for a young man who was handsome, of course, but who conveyed a real sense of uprightness. Not an antihero but a real hero — someone who, at the same time, seemed strong and rigorous and interesting," Downton Abbey's creator, Julian Fellowes, says. "Dan seemed to possess all these qualities. He is able to make a kind of niceness sympathetic in a way that harks back to an earlier tradition: Jack Hawkins or Kenneth More or Gary Cooper or Cary Grant. It seemed to us that this was a very useful quality in a world rather jaded by the betrayal of its economic systems, and so it proved."

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Stevens, who grew up in Wales and southeastern England, made his Broadway debut this past fall in The Heiress, a revival of the 1947 play based on Henry James's Washington Square. In it he assumes the role of Morris Townsend, another character inhabiting society's periphery. Returning to New York after a languorous time in Europe, where he has spent much of his modest inheritance, Townsend meets a wealthy young woman (played by Jessica Chastain) and pursues her with a motivation not wholly pure. The role requires a kind of purging of the straightforward goodness he brings to Matthew Crawley, a man who, bestowed vast riches, only hopes to continue his quotidian obligations as a lawyer.

"Is Townsend in love with her? Is he in love with the money? Can you be in love with both?" Stevens asks, expounding on his stage character's motivations over lunch during a rehearsal break in Manhattan one afternoon. "It's not just 'stuff' for Townsend," the 30-year-old continues. "It's having beautiful things: the right wine goblet, the truly beautiful couch." Stevens's approach to the character is divorced from certain judgments about the moral emptiness of materialism. "You can be romantically interested in someone and love them and still, I think, be really interested in things and a certain lifestyle that person might provide," he offers.

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It's a generous philosophy, considering that Stevens doesn't seem enamored of aristocratic trimmings. His permanent home is an apartment in Crouch End, in northeast London, a neighborhood of journalists, actors, and musicians. He lives with his wife Susie Harriet, a jazz singer he met doing a play, and their two children, Willow (age 3) and Aubrey (7 months). In England he's known as more than an actor; he challenges any feeling of cultural parity we might have with the British. His Twitter feed, which has 54,000 followers, so captured the interest of the editors at the Sunday Telegraph that they gave him a monthly column in which he writes about his own life, the arts at large, and, really, whatever inspires him. Since arriving in New York he has covered the miseries of Labor Day weekend traffic. And he has cautioned readers to be wary of speculation about the third season of Downton Abbey and of the media more generally. "As one tabloid journalist confessed to me this week," he wrote in a September column, "'It doesn't matter what is actually said, we can take it all wildly out of context anyway. And if no one's said anything very pertinent or newsworthy, well, we just make it up.' You have been warned."

As we export Kardashians and Trumps, the English seem to consistently volley back celebrities who can think and speak in whole (and often extremely erudite) paragraphs. Last year, while serving as a guest on The Review Show, a weekly panel of commenters who convene on BBC 2 to discuss culture, Stevens criticized the selections made by the Man Booker committee to determine the best books that had been published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. The Booker people were so intrigued by his comments that they asked him to serve as one of this year's judges, along with historian Amanda Foreman and Sir Peter Stothard, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Over a period of seven months Stevens, who also happens to be fluent in French and German, read 145 novels to help determine the Booker short list.

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"Books are my weakness," he says. In Hell's Kitchen he recently met a vendor from whom he bought volumes of Beat poetry and some Walt Whitman. "I'm doing my bit to revive this orphan, paper," he jokes.

His was always a precocious mind. His parents, now retired, were schoolteachers, and they sent him to Tonbridge, an exclusive boys school. Recognizing his academic potential, his teachers persuaded him to apply to Cambridge, where, he said, he found "a world of people who were not embarrassed by intellectual engagement." At Emmanuel College he concentrated in English literature and became a member of the well-known Footlights troupe, whose alumni include Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, and Emma Thompson. Stevens was drawn to comedy, but his forays into straight plays were so successful that they quickly launched a theatrical career more serious than anything he'd expected.

He performed in only two dramas at Cambridge: The Taming of the Shrew and Macbeth. In the latter he played the title role opposite his friend Rebecca Hall, whose father, the celebrated theatrical director Peter Hall, was so impressed with Stevens's skill that he cast him in a Theatre Royal Bath production of As You Like It. Rebecca, who calls Stevens a "serious actor who doesn't take himself seriously," played Rosalind, and the well-received production eventually toured the United States, coming to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2005. Stevens calls his trajectory "quite surreal and probably quite offensive."

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Later he was given a leading role in the BBC miniseries The Line of Beauty, based on a novel by Alan Hollinghurst. Here, too, he played a middle-class outsider, a young man out of Oxford who moves in with the son of a Tory cabinet member during the reign of Margaret Thatcher. But it was his performance in a BBC production of Sense and Sensibility that caught Fellowes's eye. "If you can steal Sense and Sensibility as Edward Ferrars, one of the dullest parts in the English canon," Fellowes says, "you have definitely got something."

Stevens liked the Downton script right away. "It had tongue-in-cheek nods to modernity, which I enjoyed," he says. He was utterly unprepared for the fanfare with which the series was greeted in the United States. In New York, where he has been living since beginning rehearsals for The Heiress, he has been surprised to find that he is recognized. "I feel as though I'm a long way from home but that it has followed me. The enthusiasm here is so great."

Still, Stevens has said he may or may not return for a fourth season of Downton Abbey, which has not yet been commissioned. He's busy expanding his already rather broad professional scope into film production; he recently produced Summer in February, based on a novel written in the mid-'90s by Jonathan Smith, one of his teachers at Tonbridge. Again the backdrop is the Edwardian era, but this time the story, set in Cornwall, involves a group of artists and a love triangle in which Alfred Munnings, the famous English painter of horses who later became head of the Royal Academy, plays a role. A retired investment banker friend of Smith's raised the financing, and Stevens performs in the venture as well, playing Gilbert Evans, a character who, like Matthew Crawley (and unlike Morris Townsend), arouses few suspicions of duplicity. "A woman marries the wrong guy,'' Stevens says. "And I'm the right guy. Of course I am!"

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